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Constraints on dark matter-nucleon effective couplings in the presence of kinematically distinct halo substructures using the DEAP-3600 detector

DEAP-3600 is a WIMP dark matter direct-detection experiment located deep underground at the SNOLAB facility (Sudbury, Canada) which uses liquid argon as the target material. This seminar presents data interpretations based on the first year of search.

DEAP-3600 is a WIMP dark matter direct-detection experiment located deep underground at the SNOLAB facility (Sudbury, Canada) which uses liquid argon as the target material. During the first year of search, zero candidate events were observed, resulting in limits on the isoscalar, spin-independent WIMP-nucleon cross-section above 3.9 x 10-45 cm2 (1.5x10-44 cm2) for 100 GeV/c2 (1 TeV/c2) WIMP masses. This new study reinterprets these results by using a Non-Relativistic Effective Field Theory (NREFT) framework to consider other dark matter-nucleon interactions expressed in terms of effective contact operators (O1,O3,O5,O8 and O11) as well as specific interactions (millicharge, magnetic dipole, electric dipole, and anapole) and isospin-violating scenarios (isovector, xenonphobic) where we achieved world-leading limits for some model parameters. The research further examined how DEAP-3600’s constraints are modified due to the presence of potential substructures in the local dark matter halo, motivated by the observations of stellar distributions from the Gaia satellite and other astronomical surveys.

Host: Ziqing Hong
Event series  eHEP Seminars and Events